lostcarnival | ⇨ GREYSOL

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 155 - Day 169
Where: Greysol
What: The carnival resumes its tour, this time heading to Greysol, a city tied deeply into the fabric of the multiverse. Here, everyone has an animal companion from birth that is the second half of their soul - and thanks to the Ringmaster, so do you. (Remember,

joysweeper is our guest event runner for this location, and location specific questions should go to them.)
Warnings: Individually marked!

THE CITY OF GREYSOL↴

The carnival arrives in a manicured park in the center of a big city that sprawls out along where the river reaches the ocean. It’s spring, early enough that nights are chilly, warm enough in the days that people and their souls savor the weather, and sometimes shelter together from the rain. Greysol was designed from the bottom up to accommodate the human-dæmon bond. Go out and see!

► THE SHAPE OF YOUR SOUL: The dæmon-forming spell kicks in at about four in the morning. Most characters will wake up with their souls in some small form, curled against them. Even if they were awake, they became dazed and unfocused while their souls were being drawn out of their bodies and have little memory of how it happened.

Until that evening every character's dæmon is able to change shapes, and children and some teens will continue to do so. Most will settle on their permanent forms by evening. Characters without dæmons will just look on, and the few who are thousand-pound bears have to handle being really big.

► IT’S GOOD TO SETTLE: Elaine Tavis Aracari, sixteen-year-old daughter of two actors and a moving pictures sensation herself, just ‘settled’ - her dæmon Tavis stopped changing shape - as a stunning blue peacock. Settling is a major coming of age milestone and celebrated as such in different ways all over the world. She and her family are throwing a massive party in the central park and inviting the public to join in! Enjoy easy access to free catering, live music and showings of moving pictures, and displays of mostly trivial magic. There are also form readers from across the country setting up booths, happy to accept a small fee to inspect your dæmon’s settled or most favored forms and tell you what they mean. Is there anything to these analyses? Eh, maybe, but they’re flattering and fun.

► WITCHING HOURS: Characters who are clearly witches for this event will often be assumed to be in town for a lover, and people, witches and not, may want to know who that is. Humans usually regard them with wary respect and interest. Real witches living with their human families or on business quickly suspect that something’s up, but without clear and present danger take a relaxed wait-and-see attitude. Wait for long enough and any possible decision will come around again, they believe.

There isn’t time to learn much witch magic, but witches, real and carnival-made, have an inherent power: the ability to fly using branches of “cloudpine”, an attractive soft-needled tree common in the park. Witches usually ride large branches as if they’re steeds but can use even short sprays, and you’ll probably see the few witches in the city coming to the park to do so. Why not try?

► BEAR PUN: Human-panserbjørn relations have historically been troubled, but have warmed in the past century. It’s the 65th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Bertin, a much-mythologized time when Spectres flooded Greysol and a company of panserbjørn arrived and directed efforts to get the survivors out of the city. A statue is being erected and many florid accounts of the story are being told. If you’re in a panserbjørn shape for the duration of the visit you will probably get thanked and celebrated by people trying to hide their nervousness of you. Expect someone to ask if your dæmon would be a human - it’s a common supposition.

► KERNER ISLAND: From the harbor you can see a wooded island. Although there are no rocks to speak of it sports a tall lighthouse, and nearly all boat traffic avoids it carefully. On a clear day someone with binoculars or a particularly sharp-eyed soul can see loads of trash, birds and various other animals that don’t seem local, and… children? Adults and settled teenagers will see tall vague shapes moving about too.

When asked about it the most important thing adults will tell other adults is don’t go there. They’ll hold their dæmons close and tell you that on that island are things that eat souls. They may also admit with mixed pride and shame that it’s been a source of wealth and innovation for the city. There’s a facility there that can open windows into other worlds, and the children who can reach it can cross through and bring things back. Many of the children are recruited by research and development teams on the lookout for items they can use, but there are also kids out to have adventures or who’ve run away. More on this later.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It's alright if you don't know anything about scouting or repairs. That's diversity, right?"

Androids have specialisations but vastly different personalities across the board, after all.

"Anyway, we androids don't have families, so I was hoping you could tell me more about them. I was doing some digging about them for my operator, but she only explained humans live in small groups linked by blood or social custom before she got all weird about it."

"Families?" He perks up. Yuya definitely knows about families, that's pretty imprortant to him. He's a little surprised 9S doesn't already know if he's supposed to be built for humans. Wouldn't he have all that knowledge built in?

"Yeah, I can tell you about families. Uh, was there something specific you wanted to know?" Or just... everything?

Where to begin?

"Um. Well..." He curls a hand under his chin. "Why is being linked by blood so important to being a family?"

Strange hadn't wanted to talk about family, saying he had a strained relationship with his. Which had been disappointing at the time, but no matter how curious 9S was about it, he had to respect the wishes of a human!

"It's just a biological relationship, isn't it?

"It..." Yuya furrows his brow and shifts on his feet. That's not quite right, but it's an assumption he took for granted before. It's jarring to be faced with the need to defend his actual relationship to his parents.

"It's not really. Most people live with the family they're born into but you can be adopted too! Or you can have honorary family if someone is really close."

Hm. This must be the social custom aspect of it that 21O mentioned before she disconnected him from their conversation.

"If it's not biological... then what does it mean to have a family?"

There has to be some reason for it! Humans don't do things without reason, after all.

"Does having a family serve some kind of important social function? Is it another one of those human rituals?"

Yuya's face contorts at that. He really hopes 9S knows how humans develop already or this is gonna lead into an awkward conversation.

"You know what babies are, right?" He raises an eyebrow. "Your family is who takes care of you when you're too little to take care of yourself... or if you're older, you take care of them. They're supposed to always be there for you and love you no matter what."

Yuya's lucky; 9S knows all about that. And had to deal with creatively avoiding having that very same conversation with a machine.

Oh, oh! He knows about this!

"Is this because human society is built around how you don't have a job during your first ten years of your life?"

That's what Strange told him!

He sort of has a vague understanding of love. Love is... he knows it's a powerful driving force for humans. In androids, engaging combat is akin to the biological synaptic responses induced by the human emotion of love.

"So if there's someone who I always look out for, does it make them my family?"

"Uh... kind of? We go to school way earlier than that. You can start working at fifteen but most people finish high school instead. I'm from Japan, so other countries are probably different?" He has vague memories of Portland's education system and he's pretty sure high school was a requirement and not an option at the time, anyway.

He smiles at 9S's follow up question, however. That's easier to explain the the education and labor system. "It can! You can have friends who are so close they're just like family, and all your family accepts them like me and Yuzu."

Um. Right. Strange had mentioned school when he explained 'education' to him.

9S chews on his bottom lip for a moment, before asking, "What if... you kind of want them to be family, but they don't want to?"

Oh. Yuya's cheerful expression almost immediately slips into a frown and he shifts awkwardly on his feet. "Well, you kind of have to agree on it... but even if they don't think you're family, friends are important too! It might not mean that they care less?"

"I don't know if I really understand the difference..."

Clearly, what he needs to do is find this Yuzu and talk to them, too.

"But I guess... If everyone cares for each other, then it doesn't matter if you're family or friend. It's the same?"

He sounds deeply unsure.

Yuya scrunches his face, finding it difficult to explain... but he'll go ahead and latch onto 9S's self-assurance and reinforce that. "Yeah! That's the important part. There's other people here who don't have families either, and she said they just make really special friends instead."

Don't have families...? But doesn't every biological being have a blood link? Or did they...

Oh.

9S similarly scrunches his face as he thinks about that.

"It's weird. Records make it sound like family and friends are really different. But you're the human, so..."

He'll take your word for it, Yuya!

⇨ GREYSOL

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